Iain McGilchrist Quotes

16 quotes in 282 categories

• We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this…
• Socialism and capitalism are both essentially materialist, just different ways of approaching the lifeless world of matter and deciding how to share the spoils.
• Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing…
• The nature of creativity is to make space for things to happen... We can drive it out with our busyness and plans.
• The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.
• In Shakespeare, unique individuals repudiate the stereotypes demanded by the structure of the play: Shylock commands our sympathy, Barnardine refuses to be hanged. Individuals trump…
• Perspective in art has receded along with harmony in music: We tend more and more to see the world as a heap of intrinsically meaningless…
• I trained in medicine after pursuing an academic career in the humanities, mainly because of my interest in the relationship between mind and body, and…
• The truth, it is said, is rarely pure or simple, yet genetics can at times seem seductively transparent.
• We have 26,000 genes. But a blind, millimetre-long roundworm with only 959 cells in total already has over 19,000.
• Hunters and trackers learn not only to understand intellectually a bunch of facts about the animal they follow, but to feel their way into the…
• Attention may sound dull, but it is an essential aspect of consciousness. In fact, it governs what it is that we turn out to be…
• To understand something, whether we are aware of it or not, depends on choosing a model. We get to understand what we see by comparing…
• The world appears rectilinear, but is in fact curvilinear - a literal truth in physics, and a metaphorical one in metaphysics.
• It is not rational to assume, without evidence, that rationality can disclose everything about the world, just because it can disclose some things. Our intuition…
• Being uprooted from your own culture, provided you take with you the way of thinking and being that characterises the more integrated social culture from…

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